 I know this wasn't your first time writing about children. How did you come to focus on kids in your reporting overall? And what drew you to this particular story? Yeah. Well, this story is one that really got stuck in my craw. I first found out about it a month after I moved to Nashville. I'd come from Chicago. And this was in the early spring, late winter of 2016. And a month after I moved here, these arrests of 11 children happened in Rutherford County. And it was just a really big story. It was all over the newspapers. It was in the national news. And I just thought, what is going on? Like, how does this happen? And it was a story that I felt surely had a much bigger answer to why this had happened. I at that point really was just kind of watching from the sidelines. But when I started reporting more in Tennessee and I joined a national public radio, I discovered that there had been a lawsuit that kind of grew out of these arrests. In fact, there were five lawsuits from the arrests and then another class action lawsuit that have been filed. And I covered a big moment in that lawsuit in 2017. It was an injunction. And when I covered that for like a daily news story, that's when I really was diving into the filings. And I realized that this was a huge story and that it had started with Hobgut because one of the plaintiffs of this big class action lawsuit was a kid who was arrested in that mass arrest of children that I had seen just after I moved here. So for me, it was a real connecting of the dots. And when I saw that and I began to dig into the filings of the court case and just all of the lawsuits surrounding this county, this really big story emerged. And it was kind of exactly what I not what I thought. But what I what I saw when the arrest happened was this must be the tip of the iceberg of something. But like, what's under the surface? And this this is what was under the surface was all of these lawsuits. And what they were describing within them, which was this really intense regime under this one judge where kids were being wrongfully arrested and illegally jailed and it was happening for years. So tell us a little bit more about what you uncovered when you started to investigate. What were the big findings of this story for people who may not have read the original piece? Yeah, so the big findings were that this was a juvenile justice system that was really making its own rules. It was it had a policy on the books that came from the judge that told police to arrest children for any delinquent offense and even for status offenses, which are things that are like the smoking, skipping school, breaking curfew. She had this policy in place where she told law enforcement to take all those kids into custody to arrest them, even though state law says don't do that. It's more strict when you can actually arrest a child. So one of the things we found was this policy on arrests. Another thing we found was a policy that was illegal about detention. So it was an illegal policy that the jail used to decide when to detain a kid, and that policy did not follow state guidelines for when to detain a kid. But we also found a lot of oversight lapses on the state level, too. There is the Department of Children's Services that are supposed to inspect jails. They never caught the illegal policy. There is the Board of Judicial Conduct. They never had investigated this judge. There is the Administrative Office of the Courts. They had received a lot of data that showed that this county was a really big outlier in the number of kids it was jailing. Nobody ever flagged it. So while the policies were on the county level, there was this huge element of state oversight that was lacking. And so Ken Armstrong and myself in our first story really chronicled the kind of like, how did this happen? What was happening? And what wasn't happening on the county and state level? I remember when we were working on the editing, saying over and over again, but these reports were arriving somewhere and ending up in someone's little metal basket on their desk. And I just had that image in my head like, my god, this information existed. It was there and it just sat in that metal basket on someone's desk and no one ever did anything about it. And I think that's what your reporting really showed is that it was available and not acted upon. I'm curious about the larger meaning of this. We've been working together now in partnership for quite a while on this. I think about three years. This between ProPublica's local reporting network and Nashville Public Radio. And I did wanna ask you for your thoughts about why a national audience would be paying attention to this story. And we know that they did because it had a lot of attention before you started working on it, when you worked on it, that story was all over the place. And I just wonder like what resonance do you think it has for people outside of Tennessee? Yeah, I mean, I think this idea of what happens in juvenile court, like what is happening in juvenile justice is really a question that everyone needs to ask themselves. Because while policies and statutes differ state to state, the reality is is there are some things that are constant around juvenile law and juvenile courts. One is that they are highly secret and private. Records are sealed. Court proceedings are mostly private because of those kind of privacy procedures and which are good. Kids should be able to have their alleged crimes and criminal activity stay between them and the court. When they're under 18, they should not follow them. However, the flip side of that is that there is a real lack of accountability for the adults. There is just no light shined on what's happening in juvenile court. I often describe it like a black box. Like you just don't know what's inside there. And when I came across these federal lawsuits, it was like peeking inside, kind of cracked the door open. And so I think on a national level, what it really, what it kind of triggered in people was that, oh my gosh, like if this is happening in one juvenile court, like what's happening in my juvenile court? And we like to think that like the most important and special thing about juvenile court is that it is private, that it is all geared toward rehabilitation, but those things are not necessarily happening. And we don't know a lot of what's happening in juvenile court because of this privacy policy. And so I think it just really got people's attention and it made people think about juvenile court in a way that we haven't in a while. And I think that it forced people to think about what was happening in their own community. And so juvenile court, anything related to children, I think is always really important. And I love reporting on children. And I think that if we can tell more stories that center children in a way that gives them agency, then we can make these systems better for them. But it's also just really hard to tell these stories because of all the privacy procedures in place. So I think the fact that it was around kids and the fact that it was around this system that most of us, unless we're in it, don't really know how it works and we don't really know what's happening. And I think it just really caught a lot of people by surprise. I think the irony that the protections that are in place for kids also protect the people who might be harming them really comes out in the column you wrote when the podcast launched a couple of weeks ago. And I think that is a really poignant thing that policymakers and lawmakers have to think about. When you started the reporting, just wanna dig in a little bit because obviously there were a lot of obstacles to your doing this work. What were some of the challenges that you faced with this particular story? Yeah, well, there were a fair amount of initial challenges. I started reporting on this in the middle of the pandemic. So I knew that I wanted to investigate this story. I knew that at this point, the judge and the jailer, the two people who were primarily responsible for these illegal and troubling policies were still in their jobs and that the judge was up for reelection the following summer. So I knew that I wanted to start digging in, but also we were all in lockdown and that was very limiting. However, this case, because there were seven federal lawsuits and two class actions, there was a lot of paper to sift through, there was a lot of documents to read and request. And so that kept me busy for a while, but the thing that is challenging about requesting any documents or records related to children is that there is this element of privacy. So for instance, we requested all of the audio, and this is the first episode of the show really highlights this audio, which was part of the investigation after those 11 children were arrested. We saw that there was a police review, we read the whole thing, it was like over a hundred pages, but what that was based off of was all these audio interviews. And so we wanted those too. I mean, I'm an audio person, so I wanted them. But in an adult case, they would just hand those over, right? But in a case involving children, they had to listen to all of that and redact every single mention of a child's name. So that was, we waited a long time for those records, those records were more expensive than normally they would be. There's just like, and that's just one example, it's just like every time you want something, there's just like all these extra steps that people have to take to process that material to make sure that they're not revealing some kind of confidential information that is breaking this code of privacy. And so that was initially kind of some of the challenges that we faced was just like, I mean, I would call courts up and be like, hello, I would like X, Y and Z. And they would just say, well, juvenile records are sealed. And I'd say, well, actually no, like in this specific instance, like you can give me this part of it. And it was like, they didn't even know. There's just this assumption like, no, no, no, you can't have anything. And so sometimes I was educating clerks on kind of access that I had that they didn't even know I had. Or I was writing a letter to a judge saying, please tell your clerk to give me this because per rule, blah, blah, blah, like I should have this. So some of the challenges just came in like pretty basic logistical things and processing of records. And then the second part of that was really finding young people. For this project, for the podcast, one of the most exciting things is having those voices come alive in audio. When Ken and I wrote the piece in 2021, we had children, we interviewed children, but I knew that I wanted a lot more and you were gonna get to hear them speaking in their actual voices about what happened to them. And so I went in search of as many as I could and I talked to like more than 25 young people who were arrested and jailed as children. And finding them was hard. Some of them were very eager to talk. Others were really afraid. Many of them still live in the county. This was a scary thing for them to do and many of them didn't even know what happened to them was wrong. So it was kind of like trying to suss out all of the kids, now many of whom are young adults and get them to remember and tell me about what happened to them and just try to get to as many people as possible. So that was challenging. Although I actually love that part of reporting, like kind of finding the needle in the haystack. I mean, I've become more of a document hound as I've gotten older, but like first and foremost, my favorite thing is being out in the field and like talking to people. So I enjoy that. But I think this was one of these stories that had a huge element of primary materials documents, court records, and then this other huge pot of material which was just this cumulative human experience. And so making sure that we were balancing both of those and we didn't have too much of one and not the other was really important. I'm curious about one other challenge which anybody who is working in investigative reporting faces which is communicating with the people who may have been responsible for this. Can you say anything about how you reflected the perspective of the judge or other people who had pursued this policy in the county for so long? Yeah, this story felt like there were these two principle players, the judge and the jailer and obviously getting to them was really important. But also there was this entire system around them and this was lawyers and clerks and youth workers, social workers, guardian and light them. Like juvenile court has a lot of different people that are in it. That's kind of a big difference between that and adult court. There's just like a lot of staff in juvenile court. And so what to me, what that meant was there's a lot of people complicit in this whole thing. There was a lot of people that knew what was happening and never said anything. I mean, we went directly to the judge, we went directly to the jailer, Lynn Duke and asked them for comment, they declined to comment. The thing that again, talking about audio that was so special in this story is that the judge had a radio program that she went on every month for a decade on the local community commercial radio station. And we got 70 hours of that, listened to all of it, trented slash transcribed, all of it. And that was amazing. Like that's just such a gift as a reporter to say like, okay, this person is clearly not gonna talk to me, but like I can hear them talk for 70 hours. And I just like, I mean, it was a slog but it was so interesting and fascinating. So that was an amazing kind of resource for us in this story because I felt like after listening to that, I had some authority. Like I knew phrases that she repeated. I knew stories that she told again and again. I knew, like I had this repeated pattern of things which is like what every reporter wants so that you can say like, no, no, no, it's not like she said it one time. Like she said it like eight times, like over the course of three years, you know? And so there was that, that was really, really helpful. The other thing was the jailer, she did not talk with us. However, she would go before county commissioners every month and she would relay to them what was happening in the jail. I watched 12 years of those meetings. So even in that, I was able to see phrases that she used again and again, questions that she was asked again and again, her answers to those questions. So that was immensely helpful. And then trying to talk to as many court workers, clerks, attorneys, it was not easy, but we did it. We really did it. And that's just kind of like putting one foot in front of the other and problem solving really, which is a lot of reporting I think is just like problem solving. Like, okay, well, we can't get it that way. Is there another way we can get it? Oh, well, we can't talk to them. Is there another way we can hear them talking about something? And to balance their views. I mean, I think we took a lot of time to make sure that as much as Davenport, the judge like oversaw this whole system, like we needed to know, this was not about her getting kickbacks financially. This was not about like, we knew there were certain things that like you might want to assume about a situation. That was not the case with this. And so it was really about talking to enough people to get a sense of like, what were her motivations? Like, why do you think she did this? And that all comes out, I think in the show and in the reporting that we did. But we really wanted to give these people a fulsome kind of representation. And it didn't always come through. There's always stuff on the cutting room floor. But like, I read, I figured out that the jailer likes to write letters to the editor of the local paper. I read all of her letters to the editor. Like, you just try to find any little kernel of information about a person and you've just put it in your big book of notes. And before you know it, you really do have a sense of like who these people are, the issues that they care about, the way that they think about their job and why they do what they do. Thank you so much for that. So I do want to turn to the podcast, which even as someone who's somewhat familiar with this material was wonderful to hear the first three episodes are now out. I particularly love the moment where the mom of one of these kids is telling you about her first encounters with the investigation that led to these arrests. And it really has so much tension and fear for me as a listener when I was hearing it, not on the page. And I do want to know for you, like what could you accomplish in the podcast form that maybe you couldn't do in writing? Yeah, I mean, the writing was, I mean, we'd treated it as a narrative. However, we were really able to develop a lot of the characters. And I say that, you know, it sounds a bit mercenary, but like every story has these protagonists and antagonists and characters. And this is one of those stories. There is some really fascinating people that we weren't able to flesh out in the print piece. But because this is such a story-driven audio documentary and a narrative, we were able to build those characters out in a way. And most notably the lawyers, you know, the lawyers who brought these lawsuits, they didn't factor into our print piece at all. It was much more straight and narrow. These lawsuits were filed, here's what they said. But, you know, the reality is that the lawyers have a really interesting story in all this. The two lawyers who were behind the majority of these lawsuits, they were court-appointed juvenile attorneys in this court. And so when I found that out, and I found out a little bit more about their backstory, which involves, you know, being so-called juvenile delinquents themselves when they were younger and having their own struggles, I knew that they were characters that I really wanted to lean into and feature and have them drive part of the narrative because these were lawyers who had cut their teeth in this very courtroom, they knew the judge well and they turned around and bit the hand that fed them. You know, this was not some outside national pro bono civil rights crew that came in and said, we're gonna save the children of this county. These were a couple low-level attorneys, one of whom had just gotten out of law school who decided to like take on this whole county. And in the end, it's really kind of a David and Goliath story. And I just loved how they went about doing it. I love that they didn't really know what they were doing. They'd never really been in federal court like this. They, you know, but at any rate, like you wonder what would have happened if these guys weren't there, you know? And if it is a story about complicity, it's like it's also a story about who stood up and said something. So I really loved the lawyers and I was so happy to be able to develop them in this narrative. I also feel like hearing the children in their own voices is so powerful. Reporting for the podcast was, you know, really a re-reporting of this story. Like I said, we had, you know, dove headlong into the records for a long time. We had interviewed some people, but to do this podcast, we needed to interview so many more people. We needed to sit down with the lawyers for hours and hours. And so we really pretty much re-reported the whole thing, but with interview after interview after interview. So we just needed a whole lot more tape. And so we spent the better part of eight or nine months going and interviewing and sitting down and reporting and looking for scenes and allowing or collecting the tape that we would need to drive the story because the tape has to drive the story. Whereas in a written piece, quotes don't drive it, you know? And so yeah, it was just a whole different, it was a whole different kind of mental shift. But I was so glad, you know, those documents never went away. Like they were the foundation for this whole thing, but we had to go out and get a lot more audio. I think one thing that comes through in the podcast is just how much of a mad cat caper it was for these lawyers to start realizing that something was broken and that really animates the listener to realize, oh, you know, it wasn't obvious to everybody around, you know, it had to be slowly recognized one step at a time and one case at a time that something really wrong was going on here. You uncovered a lot of disturbing facts, but obviously not everything has been improved since the story came out and the podcast is unfolding now. What do you think remains to be done and who might work on that? Yeah, I mean, you know, when we did the print story, there was some swift reaction. There was, you know, an inquiry by the governor of Tennessee, the Republican governor asked for a review of the judge. 11 members of Congress wrote a letter to the attorney general asking for the DOJ to get involved. There was a resolution that state lawmakers filed to oust the judge. The judge then ended up announcing her retirement and that she would not seek reelection. So lots of stuff happened. However, the woman who ran the jail for all those years who was the person who put this illegal policy on the books that jailed all those kids, she is still there running the detention center. An oversight board was created to oversee her and the jail and that oversight board has hiring and firing power of the director. They have chosen to keep her in that role and they have said that they support her. So there is, as far as kind of a reckoning and a realization that the county may have really messed up, I don't see that like across the board. I see them still kind of trying to preserve some parts of this system and the key players in it. There's a new judge now and, you know, he says he'll follow the letter of the law. But I think really some of the most glaring things besides the jail director still being there is just on the state level. Like a big part of why Rutherford County was kind of spotted by the lawyers was this data. Like there was this data and you had mentioned like what that report and who saw that report? And, you know, that report said like this county is jailing kids at 10 times the state average, which is like astronomical. And so we knew that because the state had compiled data and then put together an annual report every year. And the state stopped doing that in 2014. They said that the data was just too dirty and that people counted things differently. And we still don't have any data. There has been numerous attempts to get funding, to like do it better. There's been some good momentum in transferring courts to like a more universal counting system, you know, software. But there are 98 juvenile courts in the state of Tennessee and we have no idea what's going on in them. We have no clue. It's completely obscured because there's no data. We can't see inside of it. So that is I think a huge cause for concern. I think just the state of juvenile kind of bills going through the state legislature is very concerning. I wrote about this in my essay which really feels like the clock is kind of being turned back. There's all of these like very kind of draconian and consequence centered bills like that add on time that give automatic transfers to kids to adult court that gives the opportunity for blended sentencing, meaning like you could sentence a kid to juvenile and adult, you know, so a sentence could span from when they're a minor to in their early 20s. And that's really interesting for me to see after coming out of all this reporting cause I just think like, are we reading two different data sets? Cause like all the research that I've done and all of the people I've interviewed who worked in this say like these kinds of consequence centered, you know, scared straight, tough on crime stuff. It just doesn't work for kids and it costs a lot of money. And so now I see all these bills coming through the legislature and I think, what are they reading? Like, are we turning the clock back? So there's still stuff like the data gaps, like the need to kind of a need to have a comprehensive data that we can see inside of these juvenile courts, a need for like kind of consistent reporting, but also like now there's this whole new horizon of the legislature taking on these bills and really changing the code to be more strict and more intense and more consequence centered. So it's a mixed bag. Like there's stuff that needs to happen right now and then there's stuff on the horizon that I feel or as one expert put it, like it will just cause more kids to come into the system. Like this isn't gonna stop crime. It is actually going to create more problems. So, but Tennessee is not that different than a lot of states. I think juvenile crime and there is this narrative around it and the data often doesn't match. When I went into the Capitol, when they were discussing all these bills, people were testifying and our own state Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had just put out this report saying juvenile crime has dropped like over 50% in the last decade. Why are we doing this? And that's the case across the country. Juvenile crime has fallen, arrests have fallen, overall incarceration has fallen, but there is still this narrative around like kids are bad, kids are worse, this is terrible, this new generation is the worst. And so there is a disconnect. And Judge Davenport had that too, when she was talking all about how bad the county was, the juvenile crime rate was going down. So there's kind of a cognitive dissonance. I don't know how to bridge that gap. I don't know how to fix that, but you see that. You see that not just in Tennessee, but across the country. So I have a final question for you, which came up a lot with the original piece and I am sure is continuing to come up, which is about how this story and the question of race intersect. Yeah, don't mind my cat. She's crying in the background. She's fine. She's just got a little ambiance of cat. So race was a huge part of this story. And it was a question that a lot of people had because obviously, in the last few years, we have taken a lens to everything and especially systems. We want to see systems through this lens of race because it matters. For this story, race did play a really important role but not necessarily the way that I think a lot of people might expect or at least I expected. So when initially like the rest of the children, it was all black children. Like these 11 children were picked up. They were all black. That got a lot of attention obviously. And you would think like, okay, this means that this entire system is totally racist. When we crunched the numbers for the, exactly who was being jailed by this county race with those racial identifying factors, the demographics. We found that about 41% of the kids were children of color. Now that is obviously disproportionate compared to the demographics of the county, 17% of the county is black. So yes, totally disproportionate, although very much in line with the rest of the country. So I guess kind of the headline on that is when this whole system was in full swing, yes, it was disproportionately jailing children of color but not any more than the rest of the country already jails children of color. However, when the federal judge issued an injunction saying you cannot use this filter system, you have to stop using it, every kid who gets jailed needs to have a judicial order to be jailed. There has to have been like a review of their case, like does it actually fit into the statute? When we got the numbers on that, it showed that the disparities had just jumped up. Like it had been 41% were children of color. Now it is 66% are children of color. So when you see the system working by the book, you see that these systems are inherently racist, that they are inherently by design going to jail more children of color. And that's really troubling and it's really, but it's shocking. Like everyone wants to say like, oh, what? It got worse? And the thing I always say is like, honestly, like the filter system was so vague, it was so vast. It was sucking in so many children that it had this kind of like twisted desegregation effect almost like it was just sucking in so many kids that it sucked in a lot of white kids too. But yeah, now that they are forced to follow the letter of the law, you see a huge, huge disparity with the children being jailed. That's fascinating. And also a good place for us to stop. Episode three of the kids of Rutherford County is out today. You can listen anywhere where you get your podcasts and read the original investigation on ProPublica's website. Meriba, thank you so much for all your hard work for this conversation and onward to see what you will do next.